About SimonDawson

SimonDawson · ‎11-29-2018

This is an interesting topic indeed. What I'm pondering about is a setup with a geographically distributed metadata cluster with metadata server nodes near users and sets of compute nodes near users. Getting the users workspace's launched near them is the easy part. What would be interesting is if there is a way to teach the clients like SAS Enterprise Guide to favour metadata nodes near them then getting their workspace's to also use a close Metadata server node. That all said I'd say In practice the simplest approach would be to deploy your grid like usual then deploy the clients with presentation virtualisation or a terminal server. I spend my entire day using a client application streamed over a presentation virtualisation technology from Australia to Cary. The experience is perfectly usable. There are no use cases I can think of when using a SAS platform that require a low latency connection. Having users logon remotely to a client that is close to the server seems like a perfectly reasonable way to make a SAS grid available to users across the globe. Are there any use cases that require really low latency user input that I'm not thinking of?

SimonDawson · ‎11-28-2018

Where geographically is your browser located compared to the SAS middle tier server. SASStudio. The request latency can really slow down login times. Check with the browser developer tools to see if it is request latency. Logging into SASStudio essentially involves booting up some stuff in your browser with the help of the SAS middle tier and there is then a connection made to a SAS Workspace Server. Do you notice long pauses with validating the workspace your SASStudio users use when you login to SAS Management Console and validate the workspace. If its slow in SMC its typically preassigned database libraries that slow down workspace startup times. If its fast from SMC then check the ping times to the SAS middle tier host and look into the latencys that can be recorded in the browsers developer tools.

SimonDawson · ‎11-19-2018

Glad to hear your Teradata system administrators were able to get to the bottom of it.

SimonDawson · ‎11-18-2018

@ballardw has this one sussed out. It was about the 9.4 M2 era when the older style renewal utility was removed and functionally was introduced into the SAS Deployment Wizard. I don't recall specifically which release this happened but it was one of the relatively recent ones To see the SAS Deployment Manager in the start menu you need to logon to the system with the same account that performed the original installation of SAS. Alternatively you can launch the sasdm.exe from inside the SASHome.

SimonDawson · ‎11-18-2018

EDIT - Forgot to say welcome to the communities Jim! If these are not services you must expose to end users then the simplest mitigation would be to just firewall them off from potential attackers. For specific advice on mitigating those CVE's I'd contact SAS Technical Support. There are too many factors to consider to provide sound and actionable advice in this forum. When you engage Technical Support let them know about this forum thread. Hopefully you or the engineer assigned to your track can update the thread with what was decided as the best way forward.

SimonDawson · ‎11-14-2018

If you have the SAS Management Console deployed on the same host as where the SAS Remote Service is deployed can you logon to the SAS Metadata Server? This installation is old so has been working for a long time. What has changed recently? Perhaps take a look into the SAS Metadata Server logs at the time this service was started. Any errors? Did you know your version of SAS is nearly old enough to apply for a drivers license here in Australia? You really should think about upgrading. It's only dinosaurs who'll know much about this installation soon.

SimonDawson · ‎11-14-2018

Its going to be procedure based for SAS/STAT and SAS/ETS. Each procedure will load a unique library. That will require some experimenting on your part by looking at the SAS/STAT and SAS/ETS manuals, check the list of procs, issue proc foo; run; for each one in the manuals and map out what you see in the maps. If my guess as to what products the customer you are working with has this is what you'll be interested in for SAS/ACCESS stuff. SAS/ACCESS Interface to Hadoop -> SASFoundation/9.4/sasexe/sasiohdp SAS/ACCESS Interface to Microsoft SQL Server -> SASFoundation/9.4/sasexe/sasiosrv SAS/ACCESS Interface to Oracle -> SASFoundation/9.4/sasexe/sasioora SAS/ACCESS Interface to Teradata -> SASFoundation/9.4/sasexe/sasiotra

SimonDawson · ‎11-13-2018

I wrote about a similar alert another community member saw a while back with the SAS Object Spawner here. You only need to be concerned if your system is seeing major faults constantly. If you run vmstat(8) and watch the si and so columns if those are mostly low then you are likely not under memory pressure and there isn't anything to be concerned with.

SimonDawson · ‎11-13-2018

There is an option to hook some SAS code on the exit event. The termstmt option is what you use. Combine this with a bit of macro and I'd say you have a fairly awesome little solution to the problem. @AndrewHowell please keep us in the loop with what you decide to try and do share your experience with how it worked out I'm pretty interested to know. %macro read_maps; data maps; length address $34 perms $4 offset $8 dev $5 inode 8 pathname $256; infile "/proc/self/maps" dlm=' ' truncover; input address perms offset dev $ inode @74 pathname $256.; run; proc sort data=maps; by pathname; run; /* Just print it in the log for now but you can do more interesting stuff like write it out somewhere */ data _null_; set maps; by pathname; if first.pathname then put pathname=; run; %mend; %read_maps; /* Add this SAS config option to make the macro run on SAS stopping, you'll need make sure the macro is availble to the sessions -termstmt="%read_maps;" */

SimonDawson · ‎11-13-2018

The maps are a good idea. Good thinking @boemskats. The only thing with it is you have to poll to catch the maps of tasks as far as can tell. For short running jobs it will be unlikely you'd catch it unless your poll interval is pretty high. For long running tasks and workspaces that stay up a while the user is connected with their client this would work perfectly. An idea actually would be to somehow add a hook on SAS session termination that captures the /proc/self/maps. Not actually sure if there is any facility to write some code that is hooked to the exit event but that would be a pretty elegant solution. strace(1) is pretty violent with loads of CPU context switches happening. For every traced event you have to context switch to strace for both the syscall entry and exit. The impact to the performance would be too much to be something you could really use safely across a lot of processes on a heavily loaded production system.

SimonDawson · ‎11-13-2018

SAS 9.3 is quite old. This likely means it was working for a long time. When did this stop working? When was it last working? What was changed in that period since the two startups?

SimonDawson · ‎11-10-2018

There is no harm having more than one setinit loaded into the SAS Metadata Server. The applications that read the setinits from Metadata have logic to check all the setinits that are there to see if they are licensed.

SimonDawson · ‎11-08-2018

The SASFolders are not operating system folders. They can't be mapped in such a way. The simplest way to allow users to navigate a physical file system relative to their compute sessions with SAS Enterprise Guide is to leverage the File Navigation metadata property of the workspace server. This SAS usage note gives a little overview of this facility. http://support.sas.com/kb/59/828.html Try it out this might work for you.

SimonDawson · ‎11-08-2018

I've been looking around and neither opensnoop in BCC-tools nor opensnoop.bt in bpftrace can do filtering based on the directory the file was opened from. If I get some time I'll see if I can work this out and send either group a patch if there isn't a tool that does this already.

SimonDawson · ‎11-08-2018

Good question. If this was my system and it was using Linux I'd probably use a BCC tools based eBPF program to instrument what shared object files are loaded from the $SASROOT/sasexe directory by what users. Most procedures, access engines etc. have their functionality loaded into the SAS session by loading up a library. e.g sasora is the shared object associated with SAS/ACCESS Interface to Oracle. Leave the trace running a few days and you'll have a pretty complete list of what features of SAS are being used by what user accounts.

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